Masculine filters in Turkish literature: The male dominated literary field between 1950 and 1990

This thesis investigates how six Turkish women authors -Nezihe Meriç, Adalet Ağaoğlu, Leylâ Erbil, Sevim Burak, Füruzan and Tomris Uyar- entered and positioned themselves within the Turkish literary field between 1950 and 1990. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, habitus and illusio, it conceptualizes the literary sphere as a contested arena where symbolic resources are accumulated, negotiated and policed. Drawing on archival research, close reading and discourse analysis, Chapter 1 traces each writer's earliest engagements with literary journals, maps the gendered networks that shaped their access, and shows how strategic genre choices (story, novel, essay) affected their symbolic capital. Chapter 2 analyzes reviews by leading male critics -Fethi Naci, Asım Bezirci, Atilla Özkırımlı, Oktay Akbal and Burhan Günel- to reveal the ideological and gendered lenses through which women writers were read and ranked. Alongside this, the counter-discourses and critical responses developed by women writers against the intitution of criticism that defined the boundaries of the field are also examined, revealing the dynamics of struggle that unfolded around the operations of literary ctiticism during this period. Chapter 3 scrutinizes major literary prizes as institutional mechanisms that distribute recognition, demonstrating that awards hinge not only on textual merit but also on broader structures of power and capital. The study argues that these authors' careers were forged through continuous negotiation with masculinized institutions that at once constrained and enabled their agency. By foregrounding gender within Bourdieu's field theory, the thesis offers a revised model for the sociology of literature in Turkey and underscores the need to analyze literary production through its institutional configurations rather than texts alone.